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Monday, 17 November 2014

Revealed: The Catholic Church Owns A Media Company That Publishes Pornography And Erotica In Germany

Germany's biggest Catholic-owned publishing house has been rocked by
disclosures that it has been selling thousands of pornographic novels
with titles such as Sluts Boarding School and Lawyer's Whore with the
full assent of the country's leading bishops the Independent reports

The revelations made in the publishing-industry newsletter Buchreport
concern Weltbild, a company with an annual €1.7bn (£1.5bn) turnover and
6,400 employees. It is Germany's largest bookseller after Amazon and
wholly owned by the Catholic Church.

Carel Haff, Weltbild's managing director, was quoted as saying that
the revelations had provoked "a very intense and critical dialogue"
within the company. He said discussions were under way about possibly
limiting the assortment of titles that would be available in the future.

Catholic
bishops responded with a statement claiming that "a filtering system
failure" at the publishing house had allowed the books to stray on to
the market. "We will put a stop to the distribution of possibly
pornographic content in future," they said.

But Bernhard Müller,
editor of the Catholic magazine PUR, dismissed the clerics' reaction as
grossly hypocritical. He alleged that the pornography scandal at
Weltbild had been going on for at least a decade with the Church's full
knowledge. Müller said that in 2008, a group of concerned Catholics had
sent bishops a 70-page document containing irrefutable evidence that
Weltbild published books that promoted pornography, Satanism and magic.
They demanded that the publisher withdraw the titles.

The Catholic Church bought Weltbild more than 30 years ago. The
publisher has gradually transformed itself into one of Germany's largest
media companies with the help of some €182mof Catholic Church tax
levied on believers.

To increase its profits, in 1998 the company merged
with five other publishing houses that market pornographic titles. One
of them is Droemer Knaur, which is 50 per cent church-owned. Another is
Blue Panther Books, which was excluded from the list of participating
publishers at this year's Frankfurt Book Fair allegedly because of the
pornographic content of is titles.

It also emerged that in an
attempt to clear itself of potential embarrassment over the sale of
porn, the Catholic Church tried to sell Weltbild in 2009. But the
bishops apparently abandoned the idea after they failed to get the price
they were asking.